Fire!

[jeyurkon]

I don't have any good answers but my '49 Sylvania console had an unusually high number of fuses. It was pretty well protected that way. However, the UL sticker on the cabinet was inked out. The same is true for a '49 tabletop Sylvania that I have. It seems that they were expecting UL approval but never got it.

I remember my mother noticing the UL sticker being inked out and being concerned about it. It never caught fire, but it went through a couple of seleniums in its early life.

John

Originally Posted by Dave S

We had a fairly scary situation the other day in our museum. An RCA 721 was one of several sets running in the display. After ...

big companies like RCA, with safety during failure mode in mind. And I also seem to recall that in order to qualify for the Underwriter's Laboratory seal the equipment had to be designed to fail gracefully, i.e. smoke was acceptable but fire, if any, would be contained.

So I got to wondering, does anyone know how the design of this old equipment dealt with minimizing hazards during inevitable component failure? And has anyone else had the misfortune to actually experience an actual fire in an old piece of electronic equipment?

--Dave Sica

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